But it is not courteous to the reader to detain him among such unrealities as Sir Edward Carson’s Civil War.  Treason, that is to say platform treason, is not so much an eccentricity as a habit of Orangeism.  It is a way they have in the Lodges, and their past history supplies a corrective to their present outburst.  Perhaps their most notable exploit in armed loyalty was their attempt to dethrone, or rather to defeat in succession to the throne, Queen Victoria.  This is a chapter in their history with regard to which they are far too modest and reticent.

But the leading case in recent years is of course the attitude of the Lodges towards the Disestablishment of the Irish Episcopal Church in 1869.  The records are singularly rich in what I may perhaps call Carsonese.  Dukes threatened to “fight as men alone can fight who have the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other.”  Learned counsel of the Queen covenanted to “seal their protest with their blood in martyrdom and battle.”  Ministers of the gospel were all for kicking the Crown into the Boyne, keeping their powder dry, shouldering Minie rifles, and finally joining the lawyers in the red grave of martyrdom.

An Ulster poet (a satirist one fears) wrote a famous invocation to the statue of Mr Walker near Derry, beginning: 

    “Come down out o’ that, Mr Walker,
      There’s work to be done by-and-by,
    And this is no time to stand glowerin’
      Betwixt the bog-side and the sky.”

But Mr Walker did not come down:  he remained on his safe pinnacle of immortality.  And of course there was no civil war.  That period was wiser than our own in one respect:  nobody of any common sense thought of spoiling such exquisite blague by taking it seriously.  Its motive was universally understood in Ireland.  The orators of the movement never for a moment dreamed of levying war on Mr Gladstone, but they were determined to levy blackmail.  They saw that they could bluff English opinion into granting all manner of extravagant compensation for the extinction of their privileges and their ascendancy, if only the Orange drum was beaten loudly enough.  It was a case of the more cry the more wool.  And in point of fact they succeeded.  They obtained financial arrangements of the most generous character, and, thereafter, the battle-flags were furled.  Within five years of Disestablishment the Episcopalian Synod was praising it as the happiest event in the life of that Church.  The lawyers, being denied the martyrdom of the battlefield, stolidly accepted that of promotion to the judicial bench, and a holy silence descended on the divines.